


How to Stalk a Werewolf

by Guede



Series: Werewolf How-To [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Courting Fail, Crack Treated Seriously, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Morality, Humor, Idiots in Love, Knotting, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Sex Magic, Sex Toys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 09:02:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5242514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles advertises for someone to help with sex magic.  Derek answers.  It goes downhill from there.</p><p>Prequel to <i>How to Bag a Werewolf</i>; you don't need to have read that to follow this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Stalk a Werewolf

Stiles is a sex mage. He is _not_ an incubus, or a sex counselor, or a goddamn nymphomaniac. He’s a sex mage. As in, he uses sex as a mechanism for structuring and channeling magic so he can do cool shit. Incubi/succubi use sex as a life-force extraction method to feed themselves, counselors counsel, and nymphos just have fucking issues, pun damn well intended. 

“So no, you asshole, I am not the guy you fuck to get rid of the purple warts on your dick,” he snaps, shoving the folder back across the desk. Then immediately dips into his sanitization wards, because God knows what’s in the folder, even if they avoided skin-on-skin contact. “Jesus. Hey, all of you in the hall! If you didn’t read down to the line about local businesses, get out!”

Scott spares a second from snarling at the dumbass, who seems a little reluctant to just take his brush with death and go, to ‘um’ nervously at Stiles. “I think you want to go a little lower.”

Stiles looks at him. Then pulls up a copy of the flyer and looks at it, and rolls his eyes. “Okay, fine, if you didn’t notice the logo of the agricultural depart—fuck it, if you can’t tell me the difference between recycling and remediation, get out. See if I ever let Lydia ‘optimize for viewer response’ again.”

“I thought you read it before she had them printed,” Scott says.

“Yeah, I did. Admittedly, it was also three in the morning and Jackson was bitching about throwing off his training regime and fuck him, man, if he hadn’t wasted ten minutes whining about getting mud on his dick, we would’ve been on time for her breakfast party,” Stiles mutters, kicking back in the chair. He pops his feet up on the desk and then rubs his hands over his face. “Scott, why is it I’m the youngest program administrator ever in this university’s history, and yet, I’m still stuck calling on my high school crush and her frenemy boytoy for step-ins? We have a whole campus to pull from, and I can’t find one sexually curious ecologist?”

“So it is about sex?” says a new voice.

“ _Rawr_ ,” says Scott, or an approximation thereof. And he kind of sounds like he means it.

Stiles takes his hands down and pings his office wards at the same time. He kind of doubts anybody registered as a grad student is going to give him real trouble, but then again, the janitorial staff has been jacking up their prices for dealing with weird carpet stains. “Sex as in a type of physical _casting_ ,” Stiles sighs. “Please don’t expect Magic 101 out of me, that’s the next building over.”

The guy—the werewolf, obviously—doesn’t change his scowl a bit. Granted, the scowl works for him. Tall, dark, and sculpted out of pure dreamboy fantasy, right down to the slightly faded leather jacket and the flecks of blood under his nails, just in case you thought that pissed look came from something mundane like overdue parking tickets. “I know you can cast with it, it’s just, for ecology?” he says.

Well, he growls, really, and Scott’s still puffing himself up next to Stiles. “Chill, Scott,” Stiles says, and the guy converts scowl to smirk with a tiny lift of the corners of his mouth. Stiles sighs again, and yeah, checks out the guns as he pulls his feet off the desk and stands up to…avoid the asshole’s proffered hand to point out the hall nameplate. “Even if you got lost, I’m assuming you can read.”

The guy jerks back his hand and stuffs it into his coat like he would’ve cut his throat first before offering it anyway. “Yeah, and I read your flyer, too,” he says, flicking his eyes to the copy on the desk. “Just wasn’t sure if it was a prank.”

“You know, it’s a niche area but I have a _very_ good publicist, so fuck you if you haven’t realized my fucking directly results in half the produce in the grocery store around the corner,” Stiles says. He leans over to check the hall behind the guy—empty, figures—and then scoops up his bag strap at the same time. “Screw this. Scott, come on, I gotta go synch crop rotations with Tantric poses, do my part to support local businesses.”

He shoulders past Scott, who yelps and then huffs after, and then grabs the asshole by the arm and pushes him out of the office. Wolfman arches his stereotypically generous brows like he’s letting it happen, and then looks all offended when Stiles, in fact, locks the door and stalks off.

“Hey, Stiles, hey.” Years of high school sports and the love of a former gymnastics star who moonlights as a hunter still haven’t cured Scott of his galumphing, though at least Stiles can pick out the sound from miles away. “Dude. You realize who that was?”

“A Hale?” Stiles says. Because yeah, yeah, resident big bad pack, whatever. “Don’t worry, you’ll still get to go to your whatever with Allison—”

“We’re bow-shopping, drought’s been warping her wood—”

“I do not need _details_ , bro, that’s our bargain, remember? Now where was—right, so if the Hales get all up about me blowing off whichever one of them that was, I’m not going to call you,” Stiles says. “So chill out. I can deal with it on my own.”

Scott fidgets with his phone, which is trilling the siren song of Allison. “That’s…kind of why I’d rather you call me? I mean, no offense, Stiles, but Talia’s a pretty good alpha and I don’t really want to deal with all the succession battles if they go away.”

Stiles looks at him. “You make it sound like I’m gonna kill ‘em all. Scotty, you know I love werewolves.”

“Yeah, well. I’m just saying.” And then Scott coughs something into his fist about twins and industrial flea dip mixes.

“They survived, and that was doing Lydia a favor, anyway. Okay, Danny, maybe not so much, though I think his current guy’s way better for him,” Stiles says, slinging his arm over the other man’s neck. He does not peek at Scott’s phone, because he already knows how the texts go: lovey-dovey, what are you doing, smooches, hey there’s a small little tiny thing came up. “Just tell her yeah, usual place.”

Scott frowns at him, even though the boy’s fingers are already happily texting away. “You sure? I did say I’d help you—”

“Well, we know you can’t help me with my lack of a partner, though again, Scott, I appreciate that you gave it your one-ten percent on your try—” they both grimace, because it’s just a good thing their friendship’s so long-standing they’d just written it off as desperation and too much Red Bull “—so I could use a giant latte while I try and find someone, and you can get me refills in between cuddling your girlfriend.”

“If you say so,” Scott says. Phone screen says he’s asked Allison whether they can meet up ten minutes earlier than her suggested time.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Just take it, bro. Before I change my mind and go back there and start posting to the university Facebook page about how goddamn—”

“Okay, okay, going,” Scott says, dragging them towards the door.

* * *

“Look, Stiles, you’re the one who thought you’d better broaden your search audience,” Lydia says. “If you’re going outside of your immediate peers, then you have to grab them with terms they understand. And going along with that, factor in the need to filter out the garbage.”

“Filter, yeah, I can get. Default-explaining everything that we have a dedicated twenty-four-hour, multi-species, safe-sex clinic to deal with, not so much,” Stiles mutters, staring at his laptop. So the guy is definitely Cora’s big brother. Derek Hale, played a little basketball back in the day, usually ends up the grumpy sock-puppet sliver of a cheek and a mouth or scruff of hair in the back of his sisters’ photos, active grad student in the university’s ecology department. “And the one guy who shows up with actual credentials in the area thinks it’s a joke.”

Lydia shrugs and sips at her seasonal coffee special. She bumps her elbow into Allison, who’s sitting on Scott’s lap so they can coo in unison at Scott’s vet clinic’s blog posts of baby animals, grimaces, and then clocks the lipstick on her mug. Her grimace turns into a sneer and she grabs a napkin, scrubs off her mouth, and produces a new, slightly pinker lipstick from her purse.

“Stiles. I promised I’d get you more eyeballs, not that I could do anything about the sad lack of intersection between serious academics and, well, sex,” she says, applying the new color. She picks up her phone and starts zooming in on her upper lip. “You might just have to teach somebody the science part.”

Scott and Allison break from their baby-cooing to stare at Lydia in horror. When she’s not attached to Scott’s mouth, Allison does, to her credit, have a pretty sharp sense of self-preservation.

“That was a joke,” Lydia says, staring back at them. She raises her brows, then puts her lipstick away and sits up. “A joke! See? This is my joking face. God, you don’t seriously think I forgot about what happened with the—”

“Lies, lies, and more damned lies,” Stiles mutters, getting out of the booth. Because…okay, they’re not lies. And he’s got three pending consultation requests in his inbox, a collective six-figure commission sitting there, and nobody who can just lie down and think of Mother fucking Nature.

He’s also out of latte, and Scott screws up the orders when he’s got half his mind on the bouncy little bunnies he helped deliver last week. For a male werewolf, Scott is kind of unreasonably strong in the mothering instinct area. Not that mutual non-gendered responsibility isn’t a great thing, but just…the guy eats those things on full moon nights, for fuck’s sake, and then any other time, he goes on and on about proper forage composition in the feeder and whatever.

Anyway. Stiles gets a new latte, and Derek Hale grabs it off the little service tray nailed to the counter. Then turns the cup to show the ‘Derek’ with a tiny heart and a phone number written by it.

“Fine, whatever,” Stiles mutters, withdrawing the grabby hand. “Have fun with Charity, she’s a good cook but her roommate snores.”

Derek blinks. Then scowls again. Which, yeah, highlights those cheekbones, but Stiles is starting to get bored with it. “So this sex mage thing, you’ve screwed everyone around here for that?”

“Uh, no. It’s called being a regular and listening to people?” Stiles says. “Although fuck it, I don’t have to explain myself to you. So you know what, yeah. It means I have screwed everybody in town. Everybody. Your neighbor, that guy over there, the two girls you walked by this morning, the dude you sat next to on the bus—”

“I have a car,” Derek says. Then he glances over at the service tray. He grabs the new cup that’s appeared, then holds it out to Stiles.

“I don’t know, it’s got your asshole cooties on it,” Stiles says, eyeing it.

Derek makes a face at him. It’s annoyed, but it’s also vaguely embarrassed and, well, it’s surprisingly childish for a guy who looks like he started shaving in grade school. Actually, it’s kind of adorable and Stiles hates himself immediately for thinking that. “Okay, so you don’t fuck around.”

“I do, actually, just not for work. That’s different.” Stiles gives up and takes the latte. “You ever hear of public private boundaries?”

“I’m a werewolf,” Derek says.

Stiles regrets taking the latte, because now he has to worry about stupidity cooties, and he’s seen enough to think that those might actually exist. “Yeah. Okay. I didn’t realize, what with Scott there wolfing out on you.”

“I kicked his ass a couple times for getting my little sister into trouble,” Derek says. He shrugs. “Guess he’s still feeling it.”

“And I am one hundred percent sure it was the other way around. Not that I knew Cora that well, different social strata and all that, but Scott’s been my best friend from birth and I know each time he actually got somebody in trouble because, honest, you can trace those back to me,” Stiles says. “Also. I am going. Because also, you are an asshole.”

And yeah, Stiles turns around when he walks off, because whatever werewolf, he’d like to see what they can do with fangs and claws against an irritated mage and a store full of steaming hot liquid.

Okay. No, he doesn’t. It’s a good thing Derek isn’t there anymore when Stiles gets back to the table and has to turn again to get back into the booth. Stiles likes this coffeeshop. It’d just be the piss on his shitpile to have to wreck it on top of the rest of his day. Really.

“Derek Hale?” Lydia says thoughtfully. “Derek Hale’s your one actual genuine ecology student?”

“Who knew he did anything besides maul people, right?” Scott says.

Allison looks sort of uncomfortable, in that she is suddenly shoving her phone at Scott and asking him whether he thinks she should go with the ceramic composite or the carbon. Scott of course takes the cue, and looks guilty to boot.

“Well, werewolf, he’d tick off the physical qualifications,” Lydia goes on. Because she might pick up on the vibes too, but she doesn’t care. That’s why, that crush of his over with, Stiles didn’t just write her off for sticking with a dumbass like Jackson. “It’d be great for building local connections, too.”

“I guess if you wanted to know where to go to get your face insulted,” Stiles mutters. He drinks his latte and pulls over his contacts list, and keeps emailing. “Give me a break, Lyds, werewolf just means he’d flip extra hard if he ever got around to the details, and I do not need that drama in my life.”

* * *

So obviously, Stiles has researched the shit out of Allison. She’s dating his best friend, and he doesn’t care how many sparkly hearts that puts into Scott’s eyes, he wants to know what’s up.

Okay, she does get credit for shooting up people with arrows in Scott’s defense. And she’s lasted through high school and college and into Scott’s veterinarian program, and Stiles is pretty sure they’re just waiting on that to wrap to get to the wedding. Well, that, and Scott manning up and finally asking Allison’s extremely cranky—if very silver-fox—dad for his blessing. But she’s still from a prominent hunter family, and one that, in recent times, has featured in such fine programs as _America’s Most Wanted_ and _Women Who Kill_.

So Stiles already has all the grainy videos on Youtube bookmarked, and he doesn’t have to go through more than two to figure out the terrible job they did in fictionalizing Derek’s snippet of Kate Argent’s rampage to protect the minors blah blah. He watches the other three because completion nerd. Really. Not because he’s addicted to shoddy true-crime shows with cheesy voiceovers.

“If your knot is magical, that means you don’t have a heat cycle, right?” somebody says.

Stiles swears, knocks his feet and a couple books he has for cover off the cubicle counter, and then barely saves his laptop from falling, too. He shoves that back to safety, then looks up and sees Derek. Derek with a handful of printouts and pamphlets, most of which Stiles recognizes because he wrote them or edited them or otherwise was involved in their publication. Derek with that handful, and in his other hand, a well-worn textbook on intermediate agri-magic studies that has claw-marks on the spine which match up perfectly with his fingertips.

“Why do you want to know?” Stiles hisses.

“This is the quiet section,” hisses an angry librarian, popping up from another cubicle like an angry librarian gopher. “Conference rooms are along the wall. Use them.”

Derek looks at Stiles. Tucks that textbook under his arm, and hikes up the bookbag on his shoulder.

They relocate to the stupid conference room. “You’re stalking me, and why do you want to know?” Stiles says.

“I’m stalking you because I wanted to know,” Derek says, and great, he’s learned to be amused sarcastic instead of just pissy sarcastic. “And I wanted to know because I had to bring a bunch of medical forms for my geomancy labs to show I wasn’t going to hit heat in the middle of it, so isn’t that a problem if you do have it? Or your partner does?”

Which is…an actual intelligent question. Stiles stares at Derek. Derek stares back, a little miffed, like he doesn’t know why that should be suspicious.

“I don’t have a heat cycle,” Stiles finally says. He looks at the stuff Derek’s holding and Derek rolls his eyes and puts it all down on the table so Stiles can paw through it. Then he sits down. Then he starts to open his laptop—also, good, his illicit love of crappy reenactments has ensured they’re well into the segment about how the Bermuda Triangle’s caused by aliens and not just an unusually strong confluence of ley lines. “Wait. So how far did you get into geomancy, anyway? And have you taken anything in systems ecology, or biomagic macro manipulation, or—”

“You want me to just pull my transcript for you?” Derek sighs.

Stiles thinks about it, then shrugs and nods. So Derek puts his stuff down and pulls out a sheet of paper from his bookbag, and hands it over.

Good spread, actually, Stiles thinks. The labs are kind of spotty, but if Derek managed to score an independent study with Professor Inari, then he must have persuasive chops besides his ability to resemble a slumming model.

“So heat fluctuations would fuck stuff up, but if the non-heat partner is the active caster, you can actually redirect a lot of it back into the spell and strengthen the fertility elements, if that’s the branch you’re working in,” Stiles says. He pages past the grades to the section listing Derek’s thesis advisors. “If it’s not a fertility spell, well, you’re probably not worrying about synching with natural rhythms so it’s really more of a practical problem. Having one partner be an insatiable sex demon tends to throw off your timing. And makes it hard to check the monitoring equipment. And take notes.”

Derek starts to interrupt and then stops himself several times, his eyebrows ticking higher with each issue Stiles reels off. He finally just settles on glowering. “That’s not what heat’s really like.”

“No, I know, but it’s what everybody seems to want it to be like. Blah blah blah, kinky sex marathon, honey, let’s just stay home and you tie me to the bed. Except like I keep saying, this is _work_. Which happens to involve sex.” Stiles puts the transcript down on the table, then pushes it back to Derek. “I’m on a job, I’m not just fucking in a field to fuck in a field, okay? You’re doing serious spellwork. If you just blow off part of a ritual so you can get off, you could trigger an earthquake.”

For a couple seconds Derek stares at him. Then he snorts. Slouches in his chair and appears to make himself comfortable. “If you were doing that level, I don’t see how we’d miss the evacuation order.”

“Well, it wasn’t _here_ ,” Stiles mutters. Makes himself comfortable when Derek’s eyes widen a little. “Okay. Fine. But it’s still a bad thing if my client’s farmland, which they’re paying me to fix, suddenly loses all its nitrogen just because the asshole I happen to be sticking it to wants to do dirty baby talk instead of chanting Latin. So this is not a prank. This is my actual career.”

Derek stares at him again, then abruptly reaches over and grabs the transcript. He’s still looking at Stiles and he appears to be thinking something over. “Okay. So what do you have to do, if you’re not the active caster?”

Stiles starts to explain, then catches himself. “Oh. _Oh_. Oh, I totally see it, you asshole, what, I haven’t even seen your fucking resume and you think you can just—just slide this interview by me—”

So Derek rolls his eyes and pulls out another piece of paper. Which is a resume.

“References are on the back,” he says.

They’re good references, damn it. One’s even somebody Stiles has partnered with before, and would happily partner up with again if they weren’t in a relationship with a succubus (not a jealousy issue, it’s just, honestly, only so much to go around and neither Stiles nor the succubus want to literally fuck somebody to death). And, if Stiles is going to be honest, the people on Derek’s thesis committee are all good names, too.

“Still, interview, I ask the questions, I’m the hiring manager,” Stiles says to the resume. It’s even a clean, straightforward format. No stupid curly section dividers or Comic Sans fonts.

Derek sighs. “Okay, so…”

“So why do you want to do this when you thought it was a joke?” Stiles says, looking up.

Derek makes that face at him. That petty, slightly chagrined face, which is just as much about understanding that he’s a big bad werewolf looking like an idiot as about the actual idiocy itself, which is stupidly cute on his stupidly handsome bone structure. “Because I was wrong and it’s not a joke, and now that I’ve looked into it some, I think it’s a really interesting application of agri-magic systems remediation.”

Stiles shoves the resume aside and grabs his laptop, and even opens up a blank note. Not that he’s actually planning to taking anything down, because why bother when there are not even remotely any other candidates. “Let me clarify. Why did you even come the first time if the flyer sounded like a joke to you?”

For a second Derek looks like he’s done with it. He scuffs his feet on the floor, puts his hands on the arms of the chair, and then he sighs and drops his hands off to dangle on either side of the chair. He still looks pissed, but it’s more of a resentful, brooding pissy, like he’s too busy talking himself into not giving a shit to try beating up Stiles.

“Because I’m graduating in a semester, and I need a job,” he mutters, looking away.

“Sounding like I’m your last-chance dance is not helping your case,” Stiles says, typing compounding formulae. Because cover. “You’re a Hale. That gets you in a lot of doors already.”

Derek pulls himself up enough to stare pointedly at Stiles’ throat. Specifically, at the spot where the arteries are closest to the surface, because it wouldn’t be a werewolf bombing an interview without that, would it. “I don’t want to get a job just because of my family, and anyway, they’re not really into ecology. For that matter, you see a lot of werewolves in it?”

“Uh, yeah—”

“In non-game management ecology,” Derek adds. He keeps pulling himself over till he’s honest-to-God hunching that James Dean leather jacket. “Just because we kill a lot doesn’t mean I want to do that for a living.”

Stiles…could take that in a lot of different ways. Most of them sarcastic. But Derek looks kind of pathetic, to be honest, in his little growly defensive curl. And also, being Scott’s best friend means Stiles has put a lot of time and energy in taking out anybody who cracks jokes about vets who snack at work before they get anywhere near Scott’s fluffy do-gooding halo. So yeah, it hits a spot for Stiles, too.

“Okay,” he finally says. “Your resume said you were into soils.”

Derek looks relieved. Then suspicious. “I’ve heard every dog with a bone joke, just so you know.”

“So you know how to work a cross-index, I hope, because I’ve got a list myself,” Stiles says. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Great, you want to enter the wonderful world of soil science. But what I do is agriculture. It’s not jungles and mountains and undiscovered wilderness, it’s farmers bitching about fungus and fertilizer burn. It’s not a sexy nature special.”

“I don’t want a sexy nature special,” Derek says. He pauses. “I think if that comes up, I’ve got it covered already.”

Stiles looks up from the formula he’s just mistyped. “Confident, aren’t we.”

Derek doesn’t even shrug. “I look like what I look like.”

“Yeah, well, some books have cheap pulp pages that go yellow within the decade under their fancy-ass covers,” Stiles mutters. “Okay. We’ll skip your magic skills for now. Sex stuff.”

“I already know what a knot’s like and how that works,” Derek says. He’s not exactly smirking but he’s definitely playing up the boredom. “I’m fine with that.”

“Fine fine, or fine like, you’re gonna—”

Derek heaves a sigh. “I will _not_ lose my mind and roll over to beg for your big, huge, alpha knot to plug me up with little wolf embryos.”

“I find that one’s a lot better if you go with the Spanish cut. Subtitled, though, because the dub has a terrible screechy voice for the bottom,” Stiles says after a second. He shrugs off Derek’s suddenly narrowed eyes. “I see nothing wrong with doing cross-field research, we use a lot of the same equipment. Anyway, more importantly, I knot you, no biggie if you need a couple minutes to get over orgasm, or wake back up, or whatever, but after that, can you accurately read something like a Geiger counter, recite the appropriate Latin phrase, and then help me fill out a six-page environmental impact statement?”

“I think so,” Derek says. He doesn’t just snap yes right away, which earns him a couple points. He shifts around a little, then jerks his shoulders back on defense, sticks his chin forward on offensive. “Look, I never actually have done that before, but I don’t see why not. I’m not gonna pass out, anyway.”

Stiles closes his laptop and sighs. “A _lot_ of people have said that to me.”

Derek snorts. “Were they werewolves?”

“Okay, hey, let’s not be speciesist here,” Stiles says. He digs around for his phone, then finds it and pops it out to check his schedule. “All right. I’m clear tomorrow night. So I’m going to email you—um—”

Derek silently gives Stiles his resume again. Which has his email and phone number, right.

“—some release forms, take some time, read them over, email me any questions you’ve got,” Stiles goes on. “You’re still up for this after that, then we can meet up tomorrow and do a practical. I’ll book a room over at the student clinic—”

“Do we have to meet there?” Derek asks. He sounds slightly tight, and he’s bracing himself like he expects Stiles to call him on it, nastily.

“Well, it’s kind of convenient, what with the location and the sterilizer, but I guess we can go up to the hospital? That work better for you?” Stiles says.

Derek stops looking so edgy and starts looking irritated again. “Why can’t we just go to my place?”

“Because a third-party location and easy access to help for both of us are good things. You don’t feel like you’re inviting a stranger into your den, I don’t feel like I’m setting myself up for a lawsuit. Or an unauthorized sex tape. Or some obsessive psycho who thinks I’d make a good sex slave when my job involves literally manipulating natural phenomena with my cock,” Stiles sighs. He reaches over and stirs through the pamphlets Derek brought till he finds the one on safe, sane and consensual cross-species courting rituals. “We’re not pledging our lives to each other, Derek, we’re just seeing what your recovery time’s like.”

“Oh. Yeah, makes sense,” Derek says, and he’s back to his resting bitchface. He does take the pamphlet, but only so he can pile it up with his other stuff and start sticking it back into his bag. Then he looks up. “Hey. So how do you say…”

“Just call me Stiles,” Stiles mutters. “Stupid university wouldn’t let me put that on anything official.”

Derek, amazingly, just shrugs. He doesn’t ask what the hell that means, or where it came from, or why Stiles would go by something like that. “Okay. Tomorrow night works for me, but it has to be after six.”

“Sure. Just don’t eat a huge dinner,” Stiles says as he gets up. “Because—”

“I’ve had sex before, Stiles,” Derek mutters as he leaves. “You don’t have to explain that part to me.”

And they’d been going kind of well at the end. Stiles starts to yell after him, but then catches sight of that angry librarian through the glass walls. She raises a very familiarly-dressed fetish doll at him—where she got the tiny flannel plaid shirt on such short notice, he would, in fact, like to know—so he slaps both hands over his mouth. Then he shakes his head, sighs, packs up. Texts Scott that he’s probably going to need a drinking buddy after tomorrow night’s trainwreck, and gets out of the library before he’s attacked by phantom joint pains or whatever.

* * *

Stiles schedules a preliminary consult for one of the three pending requests he’s got, with the caveat that he can’t determine whether he can actually accept the job till after the initial analysis. He’ll get paid for that even if he can’t do the rest, and if Derek falls through, he can do it on his own, but he hates having to refer out stuff.

“So shouldn’t you wait till after you know for sure?” Scott says. “Also, you know this is illegal, and if Mom catches us in here, she’s going to kill me.”

“Yep.” Stiles puts back the file holding Blake killing autopsy number three and pulls out number four. “And I can’t just wait, Scott, I have to respond to these people some time. Being a black hole might work for HR departments and insurance companies but it’s a bad idea when you’re building up a client base.”

“Why don’t you just tell them you’re short on supplies?” Scott says. Then he tilts his head. “I think that’s your phone.”

It is, and it’s Derek, texting another multi-part question about how orgasm delay interacts with the nitrogen cycle. Stiles would really, really like to know how the guy figured how to indent his bullet points in a text message, and not just because he wants to do it himself. Well. Mostly not.

“Because they’re farmers, Scott, they’d be all, well, what do you need, you know, I probably got a cousin who grows it, and then I have to explain it’s not something you can grow, and _then_ we either have the client propositioning me, which violates a shitload of ethics on top of never being very good, because they’re too worried to relax into it, or we have the client suggesting we just hire somebody for it.” Stiles texts back the answer to two of the four bullet points, but has to switch to his phone’s browser to look up something for the other two. “Scott, what’s the technical term for your penis muscle? You know, the one that makes you erect?”

Scott drops his file, eeps, and promptly gets down there to scramble around after all the papers and photos. Once he gets them at least in his lap, he throws a wincing look up at Stiles. “Why am I supposed to know that?”

“You’re a vet, don’t you study anatomy?” Stiles says, taking the file from Scott. He squats down so he can put it back into order with one hand, and text at Derek with his other. “Never mind. Do werewolves think it’s a big deal to not come in them or something?”

“I think this violates our bargain,” Scott says, after a long, horrified silence.

Stiles finishes up with the file, then flips it open and starts reading it in order. It’s victim five, so it’s out of _that_ order, but this is the victim that got Blake caught and he fast-forwards to the end of those true-crime show clips, too. “Does not. I’m not giving you details about anyone specifically, I’m just asking generally.”

“I know you’re texting him,” Scott says.

“For fuck’s sake, it’s an academic discussion. He wants to know what he’s getting into and I applaud him for that, I really don’t need to improvise another way to exit halfway through a Mayan fertility rite just because some dumbass confuses teabagging with anal beads,” Stiles mutters. “Jesus, Scott, he’s being a lot better about this than you are.”

If Scott was wolfed out right now, his ears would be flat and down. As is, he’s barely a step above tucking his head between his knees and whimpering. “I don’t _have_ to be good at it. Stiles, I’m your friend, okay, I support you unconditionally. That means I don’t have to know.”

Stiles would say something, like that sounds a lot like a condition to him, except Derek’s texted him again before he’s done answering the last question. Resume aside, the guy did not look or sound like somebody who’d want to get into dietary effects on semen potency before they even figure out sexual compatibil—

“Hey. You know, he’s asking me all this science-y stuff, and not a thing about kinks.” Then Stiles bumps his moaning buddy with a knee. Gets back up and puts the file back, and starts in on victim four. “You’d think he’d have at least some issues, right? I mean, look at his ex-girlfriends.”

Scott, who has finally connected the dots between Allison and Derek, looks like he hates realizing he’d rather be talking about penis anatomy. “Maybe he doesn’t want to bring it up this early?”

“Well, when’s he going to do it, then? When he’s flashbacking with my dick in him?” Stiles says. Then he frowns at the file. “Speaking of. Did you know this one got snatched out of the student clinic here?”

“What?” Scott says, jumping to his feet. He grabs the file and it’s Stiles’ reflexes that barely save it from being torn in half, thanks to werewolf obliviousness. Then he winces and jerks back, looking at the door. “Okay, you could’ve said it had dissection photos.”

“We’re in the morgue archives, Scott. I kind of thought that went without saying.” Stiles closes the file, then flaps it on top of the other ones in the drawer. He sighs. “Fuck. Look at this stuff, and I haven’t even read the police reports yet. He’s gonna freak out at me at some point, isn’t he?”

Because there’s no way this is going to work out. He knew that from the start, and he never really doubted it, even with Derek showing unexpected research chops and all.

“Well, you and he need to get along with each other, not just be good at what you do. If he does, then he’s just not the right one,” Scott says, and puts a hand on Stiles’ shoulder. He carefully averts his eyes from the file, even though no photos are visible. “And hey, come on, you don’t know. It might be okay. He’s asking, um, the right questions about what he _is_ asking about. Isn’t he?”

Stiles takes his phone out. Derek’s sent him another question, this time to ask whether full moons are ruled out, given the way the moon cycle messes with werewolf sperm count.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Yeah, he is.”

* * *

Derek’s already in the room when Stiles gets to the hospital. It’s a nice, isolated corner room, with an unusually large bed that’s probably borrowed from the maternity ward. Stiles loves Melissa McCall regardless, but her being a really senior nurse is an awesome perk of his friendship with Scott, he’s not going to lie.

So. Anyway. Stiles shows up in the comfortable clothing he recommended, that being an old pair of jeans and a flannel shirt he’s cool with trashing if it comes to that, with a box of sterilized sex toys. Derek’s sitting on the bed in very thin, very lowslung, black cotton pants and nothing else.

“Hey,” he says, seeing Stiles. His face is kind of neutral for once, which means it’s all classically cut features to go with the fucking marble pecs and abs, but it goes to disgruntled as soon as he clocks the box in Stiles’ hands. “That has lube, right? Because this place doesn’t.”

Okay, well, irritated banter, this Stiles can do on two brain cells, and no visual cues, because he’s still taking in the velvet slopes of Derek’s belly. So sue him, he has a working libido. “It’s BYO because hospital lube sucks, and yeah. Couple different consistencies, but they’re all supposed to be self-warming, not that that seems to be a problem for you.”

Derek gets off the bed and comes over to look as Stiles opens up the box. “It’s hot in here.”

Stiles is trying to not shiver because where he is, six inches away from an extremely attractive man, it’s still pretty damn wintry, but whatever. He hands Derek the lube and then starts pulling out the dildos. “Well, whatever makes you c—”

“Why are they all little foil packets?” Derek says, holding up one. “They look like those hair gel samples they hand out on campus.”

“Because I buy in bulk, so manufacturers are happy to send me testers of their latest and slickest,” Stiles says. He absently taps one dildo against another. “I never get hair gel.”

Derek looks at Stiles’ hair, which is not as crew-cut as his high school days, granted, but is short because hello, working in the dirt all day, do not need added grit at night. Then he shrugs. Runs his hand back through his yes, very lush hair.

“You’re a pretty, pretty princess, I get it.” Stiles puts the empty box on the counter and then lays out the dildos. “Okay. So I wasn’t sure how big to start off with, but—”

“We’re using these?” Derek says, frowning. He reaches out and pokes one, which happens to be a very accurate replica of an awesome English mage Stiles teamed up with during a semester abroad, and then snorts as it rocks in place. “I thought you wanted to see whether I could take you.”

“I’m not even,” Stiles says after a second. He shakes his head, then rubs his hand over his face. “Just, low-hanging fruit and I am so fucking done with being made fun of—”

“I’m not making fun of you, I’m just asking. Otherwise what the hell were all those forms about?” Derek snaps.

“Where are those, anyway?” Stiles asks.

Derek stutters a little, and he makes it sound and look like the opening bars of a fight scene instead of an awkward segue. He steps back and stares at Stiles, then stiffly digs a bag out from under the bed. Pulls out a sheaf of papers that he shoves at Stiles, and then slouches back to glower from the side of the bed.

Stiles leafs through and yeah, all there, all filled out and signed and dated. A couple have little half-erased margin notes like Derek looked up a word. “Good. Thanks. So these are…well, so you know what you’re getting into.”

“Yeah, so…” Derek looks at those dildos like they’re scum and not things that have given Stiles—and a long list of other people—many happy moments.

“So now you’re good, but I don’t know what I’m getting into, so forgive me if I just don’t want to stick out my dick straight off,” Stiles says. “I’ve had a couple bad experiences.”

Derek goes very still. He purses his lips a few times, then abruptly twists his head to the side. Cracks his neck, arches his shoulders a little, and then wanders back to the counter to look over the dildos. He picks up the one with the biggest knot, wiggles it, and then shrugs. Grabs up a couple packets of lube.

“Okay,” he says. He hops up onto the bed, then pulls his legs up so he’s squatting on it. Then he does some shimmy thing and his pants are down.

His cock is a pretty, pretty thing, Stiles has to admit. No idea about princess status, but it’s big and creamy-skinned and very lickable. Then Stiles rolls his eyes at himself, because come on, he’s a professional. “You want me to go?” he says, edging towards the door.

Derek’s in the middle of rubbing lube all over his hand. He glances through his glistening fingers at Stiles. “Why? I mean, don’t you—need to see—”

“Well, I kind of just need to know whether I’ll fit for this part, but some people get—okay, whatever.” Stiles puts Derek’s paperwork away before he forgets, and then goes back to the counter to put away the other dildos. Before he forgets. Because some of them have sentimental value, and some of them are just really, really expensive. He buys for quality, not painful rashes in bad places. “You, uh, don’t actually have to start with that one. This isn’t about impressing me with how fast you adjust, that normally isn’t an issue—”

Squatting is dodgy even for werewolf balance, so Derek rolls over into a half-lying position on his back. He reaches down between his legs, pushes his cock out of the way with the back of his wrist. “It’s not going to be a problem,” he says. He grunts a little, but it’s more of a how irritating, wrong angle, than a crap that tab is not slotting grunt. His hips hitch up, and then he braces his feet on the steel rails on either side of the bed. “Just…shit, where did it go?”

Stiles kind of has to look just to make sure he’s not going to end up calling for an emergency stitch job. He comes up to the bed, then leans over and okay, Derek has three fingers in there. And his hole’s stretched pretty tight around them, but as Stiles looks on, Derek works in a fourth finger and the guy’s ass just—accommodates.

“Did I drop it?” When Stiles drags his eyes up, Derek looks genuinely concerned. “Shit. Tell me I didn’t—”

“Oh, no, here we are,” Stiles says, digging the dildo out from behind Derek’s left hip. And so he gets on the bed to do that, because otherwise the rails and Derek’s flexing thighs are in the way.

He…is going to just hand it to Derek, but when Derek sees Stiles has it, the guy nods and spreads his knees. Which tilts him back on the half-inclined top of the bed, sending his hips sliding a couple inches towards Stiles. Cocking them up so Stiles is basically looking straight down into Derek’s pumping fingers. And Derek’s other hand goes out to clamp around the bedrail, so hard that the steel groans into a little dip under it, and fuck it, Stiles is going in.

Derek pulls out his fingers with a hiss, then wraps that hand around the top of the dildo like he’s going to push it in himself. Then he lets go and digs his claws into the bed, and just kind of, well, humps his ass onto the dildo, scooting while Stiles holds it steady. He gets halfway down like that, grunting a couple times, and then takes a deep breath that ripples his disgustingly tight abs.

Then he takes the rest of the dildo. Stiles has to do some more pushing, because Derek’s ass is not quite elastic enough to just eat up the knot section on its own, but that hole just stretches and stretches and then contracts back, a strained, pale pink that makes Stiles take a couple deep breaths himself.

“Okay,” Derek mutters. He shifts a bit, then lets go of the bedrail. His thighs twitch in as he clamps down. “Huh. Okay. So.”

“So…you know this thing isn’t fully inflated, right?” Stiles says.

A tiny flicker of alarm crosses Derek’s face. He chews at his lip for a second. “So that’s how big you are?”

“Well, when it’s inflated. Yeah.” Stiles decides he might as well sit down. The angle’s kind of bad for his wrist. He tries not to move the dildo with him, but he ends up flexing it and Derek’s knees abruptly jerk towards him, then tremble as Derek breathes slowly out. “You need a second?”

“I…yeah,” Derek mutters, so Stiles can barely hear it. He’s staring at his cock, which is half-erect. He picks up his hand like he’s going to reach for it, then puts it back. “So. Sorry, does climax come before or after?”

“Depends on the ritual, but you need to jerk off, go ahead,” Stiles says. 

Derek glances up. He’s rocking his hips a little, bearing down on the dildo and then tightening up his belly as he backs off. His movements are getting looser, and a little glow is leaking into his eyes. “Like now?”

“Like—God, jerk off already,” Stiles snaps, exasperated. “ _This_ isn’t a ritual, this is whether you’re gonna keep the fuck up or not.”

“Fuck, okay, okay,” Derek mutters, his eyes dropping. He wraps his lubed hand around his cock and gives it a tentative pull. A lot of the lube’s come off and he makes a face at it, then lifts his hand and gives it a nice, long, thorough tongue bath.

He’s not peeking at Stiles during it, which honestly makes it…kind of worse, kind of hotter, that Derek’s just doing it for himself, not for the audience. Stiles almost jumps off and just gets the guy more lube. Almost opens up his fly and joins in.

Anyway, Derek’s got his hand all slicked up with spit, so he goes back to pumping himself. His thumb makes a pass over the head on every upstroke, getting the precum to smear it back down the slide, filthing up that pretty cock, and he’s seriously fucking himself onto the dildo now, hard enough that he twists it out of Stiles’ hand.

Right. That. Stiles grabs hold of it again, then bites the inside of his mouth hard as Derek shudders on it, a little groaning noise leaking out of the man. He fumbles around till he finds the switch at the bottom, then ducks so he can look Derek in the eye. “Um, so this seems like it might be a good time to—”

“What?” Derek snaps.

“Knot,” Stiles snaps back, because that attitude _does_ take him out of it.

Derek, apparently, doesn’t have that problem. His eyes are full-on were glowing now, and he’s rutting his ass into the dildo. It takes a second to realize he’s nodding because he’s shaking so much with that.

So switch on. Stiles jerks back as Derek snarls at him, teeth going from blunt to fanged in a heartbeat, but it’s not a lunge, really, it’s a—Derek stiffens up, his head going back, and then slumps backwards into the bed. His hand works haphazardly at his cock as come spills out over it, and then drops off so he can catch himself on his elbows.

He looks so fucking good. So fucking good, and…sometimes Stiles hates his job. Well, no, he doesn’t hate it, but he is severely inconvenienced by his need to be absolutely awesome at it, no matter what. “Derek?”

Derek snarls at him again, way less vicious, clearly breathless, but yeah, it’s a snarl.

“Okay, fuck you, that’s my sex toy in your ass,” Stiles says, and watches Derek’s eyes go from lust-glazed to lust-plus-frustrated-interrupted. “So Derek, can you recite the beginning of the Hippocratic Oath?”

“The—the what?” Derek pants. “Isn’t that for doctors? Why would we need to know that?”

“Sorry, trick question. Real one—look at this graph.” Stiles takes out his phone and holds it up in front of Derek’s face. “If somebody handed this to you and recommended that we enrich with phosphorus, you’d say—”

“They’re idiots,” Derek says. He pauses, takes a deep breath, and then settles down. Absently scrubs his hand against the bed, tilts his ass so he’s not sitting on the base of the dildo. “Also, it…looks like the problem’s more with the selenium?”

Stiles takes his phone down and switches to a new chart. “Okay. This one.”

Derek looks at it. Looks at it some more, and then flicks his eyes to Stiles. “That’s a profit-loss sheet. What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with the fact that you signed a confidentiality agreement,” Stiles says. “You did read that one, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I told you, I read all of them,” Derek says. “But what—”

“So this is my balance sheet for the last financial quarter, dumbass, because I’m not a charity, and I’m not paying for people to have sex with me either. Though God knows if I did that, it’d be a lot quicker,” Stiles says. Then he shakes himself. “Whatever. Anyway. We’re set up as an LLP affiliate of the university, and you’d get cut in as a junior partner for the first year, then equal shares after that.”

Derek blinks a couple times. Closes his mouth, looks back at the balance sheet. Then pushes himself up—he hisses a little, takes his feet off the rails so he can keep his weight off the dildo—and peers more closely at Stiles’ phone.

“Why do you spend so much on PR?” he says. “You’re the only sex mage doing this that I’ve heard of, there can’t be that much competition.”

“No, but there are people who tell me they know what they’re doing, and then they don’t, and then I have to fix it plus figure out how to get my clients what they wanted in the first place,” Stiles says. He lowers his phone and looks straight at Derek. “So you’re doing pretty great here, but I have a lot on the line. I don’t want anybody who doesn’t get it, and I don’t want anybody who doesn’t know if they can handle it.”

Derek looks startled, and then he looks thoughtful. Then he—kind of winces, but his eyes stop glowing at the same time and the change keeps Stiles from really reading whatever that was. And then he’s just vaguely irritated again.

“Yeah, I get it. You don’t want somebody who’s just fooling around,” he says. “Business first.”

“It’s called being fair, don’t sound like I just dumped water on your parade. Equal contributors shouldn’t feel like they’re being screwed over.” Stiles starts to move back, then pauses because Derek looks surprised, for some reason. “What?”

For a second Derek freezes like maybe Stiles caught him at something. Then he snorts, and he’s all whatever, even half-naked he’s cooler than you. “Did you want this back?” he says, nodding at the dildo in him.

“Of course I want that back, that’s a custom job!” Stiles says. “Oh, my God, partnership does not mean you get my toys. You hold up your end and you make the money to buy your own. I’m just—I need to do something, and then I’ll come back in a couple minutes, okay?”

He’s almost too annoyed to jerk off once he gets to the bathroom next door. Almost. And then he thinks about Derek’s cock, and about Derek’s ass swallowing up that dildo, and that’s no longer a problem.

When Stiles gets back into the room, Derek’s cleaned himself up and pulled his pants _and_ a shirt on. He’s even washed off the dildo. In fact, the guy appears to be eating.

“You said don’t eat,” he says, shrugging off Stiles’ look. “Also, not like anything in here is sterile now.”

“I said don’t eat a big dinner, not starve yourself. You know, we’re going to get any further, you need to listen better,” Stiles mutters, putting the dildo away with the rest of the toys.

Then he’s going to leave, except his phone chimes with the client chime. He checks and it’s one of the pending requests, asking whether he can speed up things. There’s an attachment, which he can’t seem to open on his phone, so he gets his laptop out and boots up (thank Melissa again for the password to the good wireless) and downloads it to find that the client’s went so far as to order up an independent initial analysis.

“What’s the matter?” Derek says. Because he’s moved from the bed to looking over Stiles’ shoulder. “Doesn’t look bad.”

“Well, if you believe that,” Stiles says. He moves his elbow because Derek’s dinner is take-out noodles and they’re a little sloppy. They also smell unreasonably delicious for stone-cold noodles, and Stiles is kind of delayed on dinner himself, what with arranging for a private hospital room last-minute and all.

Derek reaches out and scrolls the screen without asking. He at least uses the hand that doesn’t have sauce on its fingers, slicked like the lube had been slicked, and okay, Stiles’ appetites are getting confused. Maybe he should’ve stopped and bought some granola bars, or something like that.

“It’s a good firm,” Derek says, looking at the logo at the bottom of the report. Then he glances at Stiles. “Or not?”

“They’re okay. I guess. I just like doing my own work-ups. Sometimes I’ll get out there and sit on a ley line, and realize we need a test that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise,” Stiles says. And then his stomach snarls.

Derek doesn’t smirk. He does poke his noodles in a deliberate way, but then he goes back to his bag and pulls out another plastic container. “I have leftover spring rolls,” he says. “Want them?”

Stiles is not that proud where his stomach is concerned, and anyway, spring rolls are his Asian food kryptonite. He takes the container. “You don’t happen to have—”

“Soy or hot sauce?” Derek says, holding up the packets.

“Both, are you kidding?” Stiles grabs them too, and then stares at the analysis. Then he checks his phone. “Okay, well, we have this room for another half-hour, since clearly, I underestimated werewolf elasticity.”

So now Derek is smirking. And he looks even smugger when he spots a stool and pulls it over, plopping his ass right on it without so much as a wince. “I told you that wouldn’t be a big deal.”

“Haha, we’ll see if you’re that smooth when we’re out in the field with the ants and the gravel burn,” Stiles mutters. He pulls a chair over and then tilts the laptop so they can both look at it. “So I’m still debating whether to take this one. Let’s see what you think.”

Derek looks sharply at him, and then just as sharply at the laptop screen. He even stops eating, though he keeps swirling the noodles around with his chopsticks till they’re one giant knot. He scrolls through the analysis, then glances at Stiles, who neutrally stuffs his face with spring rolls.

After a second, Derek goes back to the middle of the report. He considers a couple graphs there. “I think these are off,” he finally says.

Stiles looks at them. “Like how bad? Like we should redo them?”

“Well, you want to go out there anyway,” Derek says.

“Yeah, but client budgets are not inexhaustible, and sometimes you gotta roll with it,” Stiles says. “Redo would be a grand and this client, I’m probably eating that.”

“Right,” Derek says after a second. He stares at the graphs some more. “What’s the overall budget like?”

Stiles finishes his roll and wipes his hand off, and then reaches for the laptop. “That would be this one, though numbers are tentative, I’d say five percent margin either way. So what do you think?”

Derek settles in to eat his giant noodle ball—he wolfs out just enough to get the looser jaw hinge—and consider the spreadsheet, and Stiles settles in to listen. And it’s…nice. Surprising as hell, but nice.

* * *

“Well, aren’t you Mr. Optimism all of a sudden,” Lydia says, passing over the file.

Juvenile records are supposed to be sealed, but between Stiles’ dad being the longest-serving sheriff ever in Beacon Hills history, and Jackson’s dad heading up the biggest criminal defense firm in the area (and the oodles of blackmail Stiles has, now that Jackson’s exited the high school bubble and learned people don’t like the rich bully), Stiles has his ways. And he doesn’t feel a damn bit of guilt about it, considering how much that’s contributed to his dad’s tenure and, frankly, to them all staying alive long enough to graduate.

Anyway, not like Derek has that much. Scott’s got a thicker file, thanks to his amazing ability to attract every wannabe megalomaniac in the area. Derek’s problem at least seems to just be limited to some rage issues, a knack for getting on the bad side of the school administration, and bad taste in his girlfriends. “I’m not optimistic, Lyds, but I’m not gonna ding the guy for passing the first few tests,” Stiles says. “I’m not the guy who gets mad when the world doesn’t end either.”

“No, obviously. Just wanted to check that you weren’t taking over Scott’s job as the eternal sunshine boy,” Lydia says. She frowns at her hand, examines an invisible flaw in her manicure, and then picks up her iPad and starts swiping at it. “So should I update the website?”

Stiles looks at her. Then he thinks the better of his smartass comment, and just holds up mugshots of Derek from fourteen through seventeen. They’re all basically the same, from the tips of hair showing over the strobed-out eyes to the black scuff on the chin to the slightly-stretched out tee collar underneath.

Lydia sighs. “You know how much we pay for that photographer to wheel out his special lenses and get Jackson his photo for the Christmas cards every year? And then the hair and make-up on top of that.”

“Wow, with all that, I’m surprised you let him wear that sweater,” Stiles says. “You know. The lumpy one. That made him look like he had lumpy manboobs.”

“That was his _mother_ ,” Lydia says, her lashes fluttering with disgust. “Believe me, I burned that thing. Anyway, so I take it we wait and see ROI first?”

“You know, I keep telling people this is not some farm kink escort service, and then…” Stiles flaps his hand, Lydia flaps back with double the zing, and he caves. Goes back to the juvy court transcripts and damn, even in plaintext Derek comes off as bitchy. “We’re going out to do some fieldwork tomorrow. He makes it through that, then let’s talk photos.”

* * *

Stiles’ jeep is a beloved institution at this point, quirks and failing aside. That said, it is a _pain_ in the _ass_ when it decides to break down halfway up his building’s one and only ramp out of the underground garage.

So being self-employed in the age of the wireless Internet and the smartphone and the tablet means he can set up on the sidewalk with minimal disruption to his workday. It also means he gets to multi-task between that and arguing with all the other people who park in the garage (angry at him, understandable; asking him to disassemble his jeep by hand, not) and the tow truck company and the random always-high lady who lives in the complex across the street. Just because he can handle it doesn’t mean he always enjoys it.

Anyway. He finally sees his jeep safely onto the truckbed, apologizes to Lenny if any of his bitching at the dispatcher made it to the driver level, because he’s never had anything but excellent service from Lenny and Mac, and then agrees that Lenny better just cart her off to the usual place. Then Stiles sighs and tries for the nth time to get somebody with a car on the phone.

He’s sort of seething heavily at Scott’s voicemail when a black Camaro prowls down the curb and settles up by him. The window rolls down and, well, it’s not the shady international exec Stiles was expecting, but Derek doesn’t exactly look out of place.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re late for our meeting.”

Stiles drops his hands to his sides. “Oh. No way. I didn’t realize,” he deadpans. He looks at his laptop propped up on the planter next to him, then at his half-empty bag, and finally at the stack of binders that are both bookmarking each other and holding up his hotspot device. “I just didn’t notice I was still at home.”

Derek looks at Stiles. Then leans over and pushes open the passenger-side door.

Well, Stiles isn’t late for the meeting _after_ his one with Derek, but he’s going to be if he doesn’t get moving, and that one’s with the client, so he gets his stuff and gets into the car. It’s…cushy. His ass sinks into the seat like it’s being gently enfolded in leather-encased pudding.

It’s also really cold, even though Derek is wearing his usual long-sleeved shirt and leather jacket combo. Stiles is reaching for the temperature knob when Derek pulls a fluffy red and black and grey bundle from the back and shoves it between his hand and the controls.

Plaid blanket. Derek has given him a plaid, flannel blanket. Stiles looks at it, in all its Scottish-derived glory, and then he looks at the car interior, which is black leather with chrome fittings and which doesn’t have anything that didn’t come with it from the factory. No scent tree or fuzzy dice on the rearview mirror, no knick-knacks on the dash.

He looks in the backseat. Nothing except Derek’s bookbag, and even that looks a little embarrassed to be there, all smushed into a bottom corner. Just cool, spartan manliness.

“You still cold?” Derek says, looking over. While Stiles had been comparing the fuzzy pills on this—really extraordinary, under the circumstances—blanket to the rest of the car, he’d gone ahead and driven them halfway across town, past where they’d been supposed to meet up.

“Do you have a lumberjack overcoat too?” Stiles says. Well, hell, the blanket’s warm. He snuggles it around his waist and then pulls his bag on top so he can take his laptop back out. “So you’re going to—”

“Yeah, I figured we might as well save time. You didn’t need to pick up anything from your office, did you? I tried to text you but you weren’t answering.” Derek sounds maybe a little wounded by that last part, though when Stiles looks over, the guy’s busy having a silent posturing match with some were trying to muscle into the road from a gas station.

Stiles rolls his eyes at the alpha red eyes, then rolls down his window. He tears off a corner of a paper from one of his binders, scribbles a rune on it, rolls that into a spitball and then flicks it onto the other were’s car hood. Cue temporary car battery death.

“They probably got lost in the avalanche of texts I was getting from the dean,” Stiles says. “I had to skip this fundraiser breakfast and he was all whiny about it, and…what? You disapprove or something?”

Derek’s nearly forgotten they’re on green now, he’s staring at Stiles so hard. He blinks, then turns back to the road. “No, but what if he calls that in?”

“That I threw a spitball at him?” Stiles says. “Big deal, what cop is gonna care?”

“But you did something to that spitball,” says Derek, who got caught on a vandalism charge because he didn’t realize he was running through wet paint while chasing after some assholes who called him a mommy fucker.

“Sure, but the spitball’s dissolved into an unreadable wad of gum by now. So don’t worry, if anybody’s gonna get cited for that one, it’ll be that guy for wasting everybody’s time.” Stiles pulls his phone out and snaps a photo of that were’s car as they pass by it. Then he texts Danny to look up the license number for him, because Danny is the default recipient of Stiles’ lube sample overflow and as such, he owes Stiles a ton.

They stop at another intersection. Derek looks stiffly ahead and lets the sunlight artistically shade his badass coat and stubble. “So…how do you do that?”

Stiles’ phone chimes: Danny informing Stiles that the car belongs to some alpha douche named Ennis, and also, the guy has previous for wrecking a club Danny likes because he got dumped and got hammered. Does Stiles want to fire? “We have any extra time today, I’ll show you,” Stiles says, typing ‘hell yes.’ Normally it’d be a no, he likes to do his own dirty work in any situation, but this morning’s shot his free time for the whole day. “And nah, don’t need anything from the office. Just, um, don’t—”

“Embarrass you?” Derek says. He’s doing that thing where you let your voice float to show how much you don’t care, you’re just a leaf on the wind, and instead you sound like a whiny baby.

Except honestly, he is a little tight around the jaw. Stiles looks more closely at him. “Why would you go there?”

“Were you going to say something else?” Derek says. Then he glances over. He blinks, grimaces, and looks back at the road. “Oh. Shit.”

“I was gonna say, just don’t mention the guy’s smell. I know it’s bad—well, if I think it’s bad, it’s probably hell for you—but he’s dealing with a rough divorce and his ex is a hedge witch,” Stiles says after a moment. He tugs the blanket a little higher, then pretends he didn’t see that satisfied look at Derek’s face. “She’s been cursing him on and off all month.”

Derek snorts. “Know how that feels. I’ll just hold my breath.”

“Oh, my God, stoic dumbass, we’re meeting in the park, you can sit upwind,” Stiles says. He puts his phone away and pulls his laptop back up, and then opens the case file. “You went over the—”

“Yeah, I did, I didn’t really see anything to add to your list of questions. Otherwise I would’ve said.” Then Derek straightens up, since they’re coming up on the park and parking space within walking distance is pretty hard to come by at this time of day. “Anything else?”

“Try not to scare him?” Stiles says. He watches the other man closely, but doesn’t see any warning signs. “I can say that, right? That’s not insulting to your werewolf-hood?”

“Why would you think that?” Derek says. He spots a space and zips in before a minivan gets it, and then smiles with all his teeth at the other driver. “Oh, right. You’re friends with Scott McCall.”

“Aaaand let’s not insult my buddies either, okay, you haven’t earned those privileges yet.” Rolling his eyes, Stiles stuffs his laptop back into his bag and then, with real regret, slides out from under the flannel. Whatever the hell Derek is doing with it, it really is warm. “All right, Hale, up and at them.”

* * *

The meeting with the client goes well, even though Stiles has to resort to temporarily disabling his sense of smell to not throw up under the table. He spots Derek’s nose twitching a few times, but Derek seems to deal with it by just growling everything. The client’s a rancher who breeds deerhounds in his spare time, so he doesn’t have any trouble understanding it, and everything Derek says is right on the money anyway.

They go over the last couple details of the contract for the initial analysis, and then the client signs it and they break for lunch. Derek’s car isn’t going to get them far enough out on the ranch, so the client says he’ll pick them up in his truck after he runs a couple errands, and Stiles and Derek go to move Derek’s car to a garage.

“But don’t we need to pick up all your equipment?” Derek says as they’re walking out. “If it’s not in the office, where is it?”

“I never said it wasn’t,” Stiles says, and then grins as Derek huffs at him. Werewolves are terrifying, even Stiles doesn’t go _looking_ to go hand-to-hand against one (oh, my God, people invented guns and magic and strategic thinking for a reason), but hang around them long enough and they make some very funny noises, too. “But that’s not really my office. That’s just some room the university gave me so I occasionally show up on campus. My actual office is over here.”

He leads them down two blocks to a nondescript office building, and then down the stairs to the basement entrance. Derek hesitates at the top of it, because the stairs are kind of a narrow, semi-dark slit in the ground, very much like multiple crime scene photos in his personal history.

Stiles slaps his palm against the wall and it lights up with what could be charitably described as psychedelic runework. He does in fact have a very well-trained sense of color—it’s just fun to see Lydia sputter sometimes—but magic is colorblind in the sense that magic doesn’t give a damn if your eyes are burning. And anyway, normally he doesn’t show off like this.

Normally he’s not ushering down a guy who dated a darach with an underground prison and a psycho serial killer with an underground torture chamber. Derek’s eyes flare against the brightness of the runework, then stop glowing as he gets used to it. He’s sort of grimacing as he comes down the stairs, but he doesn’t comment on the colors or even on the one spot that looks a little like a giant cartoon dick and balls. Because again, magic does not care about your sense of propriety.

He does look impressed once he actually gets inside, and sees all the work Stiles has put into finishing the basement. Which does _not_ look like a torture chamber, or a mad scientist’s lab, or anything except an open floor-plan space with equipment stored by function over there, and mapping space there, and practice casting circle here, and compounding bench with plenty of pantry storage right there. With plenty of soft neutrals and custom lighting and storage containers, because Lydia.

“There’s a conference room upstairs I rent out if I need to do a formal meeting,” Stiles says. He waves Derek over to the equipment section and starts pulling out cables and meters. “It’s really far from my place, but so far I haven’t found a landlord who’ll let me keep this kind of stuff in an apartment, and I’m still putting too much money into the business to be able to take out a mortgage to get a house.”

“It’s nice,” Derek says, like him dropping a compliment isn’t a cause for staring.

Luckily, he’s busy looking at the racks of dried animal parts, so Stiles has time to figure out what to do. Which is dumping all the equipment they need into Derek’s arms, and then going over and packing up the herbal carrycase because Jesus, but that had been an actual wistful twinge in Stiles’ chest, looking at Derek looking at his stuff, and no. No.

So he kind of hustles Derek out of there. Derek’s a little snappish about it, confused and defensive, and he’s actually justified in being like that but Stiles doesn’t give a shit. They are not doing this.

They go put the stuff in Derek’s car for the time being, and then Stiles says he needs to make a phone call, because he does.

 _“Stiles?”_ Scott says. _“Hey, this is kind of a bad time—”_

“What’s wrong with him?” Stiles hisses into the phone. Then he whips around, because he might be standing inside a hastily-drawn privacy circle on the top floor of the parking garage, but werewolves, you never know. He can’t see anybody around him but he is as good as he is for a reason, and that reason is deep and lasting paranoia. “Scott. Scott. I am fucking making fucking happy noises at Derek Hale. Do something.”

Scott coughs awkwardly. Then it sounds like he covers the phone, except not enough, and he’s telling somebody named Isaac that they’re cool, they got it from here, it’s just stitching everything back together. He walks a couple steps. _“Did you actually make happy noises at him?”_

“No! No, but I wanted to! Scott, we had a client meeting and it’s the cursed guy, remember him, and Derek was totally _cool_. He even remembered to talk about the phosphates when I forgot,” Stiles says. “And then I took him to my office and he kinda twitched at the basement but then he went in and he liked it. Scott, he hasn’t even done any fieldwork and I think he’s gonna work out and I don’t know what to _do_.”

 _“He’s going to work out as…as your partner for your stuff?”_ Scott says. The guy’s not dumb, he just thinks better when he’s talking through it out loud, and as irritating as it can get, it’s something Stiles puts up with because Scott also never sounds judge-y about it. He just sounds like he’s confused. _“But isn’t that a good thing?”_

Stiles puts his hand over his face. “Scott, I like the guy. I mean, I really, really like him. I do not like him in a business way, I like him like I like runes and revenge and trolling reddit trolls by correcting the grammatical errors in their threats. I like him like—like—like I wanna _date_ him.”

 _“Oh. Um.”_ Non-judgmentally, Scott sounds like he is very dubious about this. He sighs and it sounds like he walks around in a circle some, and then he makes an ah-ha noise. _“Finances! Did you check his credit rating?”_

“…no, actually, that was on the to-do list but Jeepie broke again and hey, you asshole, why didn’t you answer my texts?” Stiles says.

 _“I kind of had my hands full of dog lungs all morning,”_ Scott says, just this side of snide, which is why Stiles does not let him get away with those grossed-out faces. _“Okay, Stiles, just—just calm down and finish checking him out. You should—do that stuff before you make up your mind, right? That’s what the list is for in the first place.”_

“Yeah, I know, but what if he checks out?” Stiles says. “Goddamn it, I even told him it wasn’t going to be shady exploitation! I told him I was gonna be fair about this! He’s going to flip out and he’s going to be _right_.”

Scott sighs. _“Can we just see if he does check out, first? Because if not, then no problem, and look, I gotta go, Isaac’s asking me which suture he should be using. Just—it’ll be okay, Stiles. Whatever happens, it’ll be okay.”_

“If it’s not, you owe me a bar crawl with no bitching about who I’m crawling over, and you’d better be around to pick me up when I get back,” Stiles says, and then hangs up.

He can’t stand on the top of the parking garage forever. For one, the client’s texted to say he’s coming around the corner. Two, it’s windy as hell, and the wind’s scuffing off his privacy ward because he just has chalk with him.

Stiles goes back downstairs. Derek’s leaning against his car, drinking a coffee. He shoots Stiles a curious look, but doesn’t say anything, just waves at the back of the car, where a second paper cup is sitting. The cup logo is Stiles’ favorite place, which admittedly is the nearest coffeeshop to here, and then Stiles drinks the cup and it’s his favorite latte. Fuck.

“I said it was for you and that’s what the guy gave me,” Derek says, like he thinks he got it wrong.

“Yeah, okay, thanks,” Stiles mutters. Then he sucks up his damn latte, sets his shoulders, and turns to face his client’s truck, which is just pulling in. Because he is on a goddamn _job_ , and damn it, he’s going to get those soil samples with a minimum of drama and hysterics. If he’s going to embarrass himself, he’s going to do it on his own time.

Honestly, he thinks, he’s just glad they’re going to have to open all the windows to stand his client’s smell. There’s no way they’ll be able to talk with that racket going on.

* * *

Taking soil cores and getting baseline readings on magnetic fluctuations thankfully doesn’t require a lot of interaction, either physically or vocally. All the equipment’s stuff Derek already knows how to use, and the form for noting down the readings is pretty self-explanatory. So Stiles just has to explain what kind of numbers they’re looking for, and then Derek goes off and does it. Walking around over the hill in his really, really tight jeans and equally tight shirt, because the coat goes because he’s overheated again, frowning at the notebook and whatever meter is in his hand, being all competent while Stiles has no reason not to watch.

So maybe not so thankfully, Stiles thinks, and then he mentally boots himself upside the head and goes to meditate on the nearest ley line.

The job at least doesn’t seem to be very complicated. Definitely a two-person ritual, and he’s going to need the lab results back before he nails down the exact one, but it’s probably a half-day job. In, out, and ugh, he is so screwed.

“What are you doing?” And of course he looks up and Derek’s standing over him, with puzzled squint and wind-tossed hair and all that.

Stiles gets up and takes the notebook from Derek, and jots down the ley line stuff before his upper mental faculties go completely. “Meditating. Did you finish up?”

“Yeah. And I know, but I didn’t think meditating involved banging your head against your fist,” Derek says. He absently runs his hand through his hair, then puts both hands back against his hips, sort of behind himself, so okay, goddamn it, they’re practically sitting on the top of his stupid perfect ass while he looks down the hill. “So what else is there?”

“Um, that’s it.” Much as Stiles wants to make up something, it’d contradict all the readings they’ve just taken and he’s not so desperate as to fuck up the project—what’s left of it, anyway. God knows he’d forget which reading he’d falsified again and this time it wouldn’t be a university test plot he’d blow out. “Ley line wasn’t anything weird, it’s pretty straightforward.”

Derek leans over to look at the notebook, then hums thoughtfully. His head is literally within Stiles’ breathing space. Literally. Stiles can still smell the damn lattes on their breath.

“So I’m just going to text the—oh, he’s already on his way. Great!” Stiles chirps, clutching at his phone. He never thought he’d be praying for his client to still smell like a shitshow and a peat swamp had a baby, but he is. Otherwise he might just have to fake a narcoleptic spell to get out of talking for the ride back.

“Okay,” Derek says. And then points down at where he’s already bundled together all the equipment into a neat stack, ready and waiting to go.

Stiles wills himself to not say all the stuff he’s saying inside his head out loud just because they have a good ten minutes, conservative estimate, before his client gets here. Stupid super-prepared werewolves.

“So,” Derek suddenly says. He’s still looking down at their stuff, with his shoulders hunched like maybe that internal furnace of his has finally clocked off. “Can you show me that thing?”

It is a really, really near thing, but Stiles does not ask what thing Derek wants him to show him, and so they do not reenact that classic porno, only with Stiles’ slightly hysterical heartbeat sound-tracking it instead of generic bass flourishes.

Derek looks over like he’s hearing the bass flourishes anyway, then away again, scowling. His shoulders hitch up a little higher, and his hands stop framing his ass and just jam into his front pants pockets. Which still pulls the seat of his pants really taut across that ass, but it’s a lot more inadvertently hot delinquent stewing on the corner rather than country life model. “Or I guess it might explain too much stuff you’ve gotten away with before?” he mutters.

Oh. _Oh_. Spitball. Right. And as for the weird burst of sulking…Stiles wonders for a second if his heart sounds like a panicky brass section to werewolves, then rolls his eyes because okay, that’s terrible even for him. “Nah, that one, not really. They’re mostly all dead,” he says, taking the notebook out again. Then he looks up at Derek. “Kidding, kidding. Honestly, though, I haven’t pulled it out since my last year in high school. Spent a lot of time in detention, that year. Came up with a lot of good stuff. So okay, if you start with—”

“You got caught that many times?” Derek says skeptically.

“Criminal geniuses aren’t born, they’re made,” Stiles says, looking up. Then he laughs at the look on Derek’s face. “I wasn’t getting caught for stuff like the spitball. It was really stupid shit, making everybody’s phones go off at once, stuff like that. I was just really bored. Classes weren’t challenging me enough and there wasn’t enough drama in the rest of my life, I guess. They finally got fed up and just graduated me early.”

Derek’s brows shoot up. “Huh. Must’ve changed a lot since I went. They wanted to kick me out.”

So yeah, Stiles has seen Derek’s complete school records and he did note the year-long suspension immediately after Kate Argent got arrested. And the delayed graduation. And then the break Derek took in college, right after Jennifer Blake was arrested, which again pushed back his graduation. He’s not _that_ old for a grad student, and Stiles kind of rewrote the university’s policy on minimum number of semesters because they got fed up with him too, but yeah. Awkward.

“No kidding,” is what Stiles finally goes with. “Well, I guess I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody, so they couldn’t figure out how to justify that.”

“Yeah. I was trying to hurt people,” Derek mutters under his breath. Then he grimaces. He looks around like he’s as desperate as Stiles to change the subject, and with a big chunk of northern California spread out in front of them, what he goes with it is…“If you were wondering why I’m still in school. I took some time off to get things straightened out. It’s not…I’m good now.”

“Well, everybody centers their own way,” Stiles says, shrugging. “And I’m pretty sure the board of regents would’ve loved it if I’d just dropped out, given how much shit they gave me for my thesis while I was working on it, but I published the fucker and now I have a whole affiliate program. So go figure.”

Derek looks sharply at him. It’s kind of incredulous, and then it turns into plain confused. And then it gets a little weird at the end. It’s like Derek is amused, except he’s not also being sarcastic about it, and he isn’t even embarrassed about the lack of sarcasm. It’s like he’s genuinely liking Stiles.

“But your thesis was a big deal,” he says. “I mean, once I figured out what they’re calling it in my advanced seminar, but I have a whole module on it.”

“Uh, yeah. Well, at the time I hadn’t figured out how to make timed prostate massage sound sufficiently academic.” Stiles shrugs. “I guess maybe I could’ve left out the homemade demo videos from my defense presentation, too, but fuck it, if I’m gonna put that out in the scientific literature, I want people to know how to do it right. God knows the ERs in this country see enough unfortunate object insertion incidents.”

Derek grins. As in, actual grin. Not bares his teeth, not smirks. Grins, apples of his cheeks lifting, eyes all warm and attentive. “Yeah. I saw the videos. They’re fun.”

“Thanks?” Stiles says.

He’s thrown by the smile, okay, it does things to Derek’s face. Things that throw him. Whatever. Anyway, it doesn’t last, because Derek tenses like Stiles is death-glaring him and that smile flicks right off. Stiles is definitely _not_ death-glaring the man, although he’s not about to swear to whatever his face is actually doing, because that would imply he actually controls his expressions and hah. He is a spaz, yes, he owns it and revels in his unruly facial features. Well, most days.

Derek shifts in place, looks around. Rolls his shoulders. Looks back at Stiles. “Hey, so…”

They’re interrupted by a long, loud horn blast. Client’s back.

“Huh?” Stiles says, once he’s sure he’s not going to trip himself down the hill.

“What? Oh, just…” Derek flaps his hand dismissively, already halfway down the hill in front of Stiles “…we need to do anything when we get back? Besides put things back in your office?”

“Ship off samples, but I can do that, I have another batch to send out anyway. Listen, don’t worry about getting the stuff back in my office, we can have you dropped off first because I have this meeting—”

Derek frowns over his shoulder. “Isn’t your car still in the shop? Do you need a ride?”

“Um, thanks, but I’m good. Scott’s picking me up. Speaking of, he, um, he had an incident with a skunk at his work and he’s still kind of, you know? So you spent a ton of time today already putting up with shit like that, no need to torture yourself anymore. Feel free to take off when we get back to town,” Stiles says.

“If he’s got that as a problem, you sure you don’t want me to drive you?” Derek says, brows up. “Because I don’t really—well, I have one class, but I could skip that.”

“No, no, no biggie. He’s my bro, stuff like that is prime bro bonding time.” Stiles hates how discombobulated he’s feeling because of how it’s fucking with his alibi skills _alone_. The only thing that’s probably saving him is his heartbeat has to be all over the place. “Anyway, you’re so close now, let’s not risk a failed class. I refuse to be responsible for making you stay in school another semester.”

He figures that should work, skating just close enough to a touchy subject get a cringe but not an attack. And it…does not, because Derek smiles again. A little reluctantly, but it’s that same goddamn smile and right. From now on, forget regulating his heartbeat. Stiles is just going to disguise his emotions with lust-induced arrhythmia. With any luck, that’ll also kill him before his ability to massively clusterfuck his life does.

“Well, if you say so,” Derek says. “So…I guess you’ll email me when we’re ready for the next part?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that,” Stiles says, lying through his teeth.

* * *

Scott and Allison are both looking highly disappointed in Stiles. “Oh, come on, you can’t do that,” Allison says. She kicks her feet up onto the bench seat opposite her and snuggles back into Scott’s corner of the booth. “Look, Stiles, I’m not going to ask you to do the right thing, because you’re…you, but what happened to no drama? Because this is drama. This is really, really lame drama.”

“I regret you and Lydia ever becoming friends, and yeah, I _know_ ,” Stiles mutters, holding up another monthly statement. He adds up the numbers in his head, then shuffles through Derek’s student loan history and comes up with an earlier statement. “Actually, who says I’m not into drama? I went to a liberal arts college, I appreciate the theatrical. Never hurts to have a little flair in your life.”

Allison puts her hand over her face, then moves it to rub her temple. “Fine. You’re not into publicly humiliating yourself, how about that? He doesn’t hear from you, he’s going to track you down and eventually find you and ask you what’s going on.”

“Based on his past history, Derek’s not going to do that in public, and if I ding his ego with the right trigger words, he’s going to curl up and roll away like an injured hedgehog,” Stiles says. After some staring at the statements, he gives up and gets out his calculator, just in case his math skills are also being screwed up by the whole situation. “Anyway, why are you taking his side? I mean, no offense, but.”

Scott kicks at Stiles under the table, but misses because he always goes there and Stiles has his feet safely tucked out of the way. And anyway, Allison’s got it covered with her disgusted look. “But what? My crazy psycho family? Um, I don’t agree with them, because with that kind of psycho, you don’t even need to know any of the Hales to agree that my aunt and granddad were wrong. And Stiles, come on, do you want to be on their side?”

“Hey, now, there’s jumping to conclusions and there’s jumping out of a plane because you don’t believe in gravity.” The calculator agrees with Stiles, and the student loan company is blatantly overcharging Derek on interest, and the correspondence with their complaints department says they don’t give a single shit. “Besides. I’m evil, remember?”

“You’re not evil,” Scott says. And then he sighs, even before Allison and Stiles both look at him. “Okay. But you’re not—you’re not _abusive_ , Stiles. Come on. You don’t kick injured hedgehogs.”

Stiles puts down the calculator and stares at his best friend. Then he sits up and pulls over his laptop. “So I’m calling time-out on all animal comparisons right now, because I don’t need—”

“You’re gonna talk to him,” Allison says firmly. And not like she’s ordering him around, or demanding he do it. She says it like she’s saying the sun is going to rise in the morning, because that’s just what it does. “Stiles. Honestly. I think I’ve known you long enough now, and you always talk a good game about being an asshole, but when it comes down to it…what are you doing now? Right now?”

“Not talking to him,” Stiles says. He looks at her. She looks at him. Then he groans and plants his face on the table next to his laptop, and keeps typing. “I’m reporting his student loan lender to the IRS so they’ll get their ass handed to them. You know, for a werewolf from such a badass family, he doesn’t use that nearly as much as you’d think.”

Scott looks thoughtful. “Well, I don’t think he likes telling them he’s in trouble. Mom caught him chasing me once, and since we were at school, I think she thought he was a student there, and she marched him right over to Coach Finstock and demanded he get punished. Finstock and Derek both just…went along with it—”

“Because they know better than to cross your mom, and hey, you didn’t know?” Allison says to Stiles.

“Probably because it happened that year I was in college and you guys weren’t, and Derek’s not the only one who doesn’t mention when he’s got trouble,” Stiles tells her, glaring at Scott.

“—and Cora looked so surprised when she saw Derek in the detention room,” Scott says, with his furrowed brow of avowed determination, ignoring both of them so he can tell his little moral parable. “She spent the whole time trying to talk him into calling their mom and getting out of it, and he wouldn’t go.”

Allison looks at Stiles again. “Wait, so why wasn’t _he_ at college?”

“He took time off to get over dating his second serial killer,” Stiles says. “Who roofied him when he found out what she was doing, then used his unconscious body in a hostage situation to temporarily get away from the cops he’d called. So, you know, PTSD, sociopath issues, trust issues, truth issues, Jesus Christ, I’m going to hit every trigger he’s got at once.”

After a couple minutes of silence, Allison pulls out her phone and also Scott’s phone. “Well, no exams this week, if you need to get drunk after you do it, we’re free. Also, Stiles, I know Dad’s weird about your job but I could see if we’ve got anybody’s contact info. If you want to try somebody with a hunter background.”

“You don’t know that he’s going to hate you,” Scott protests. “I mean, he’s stuck with you so far, right?”

“Prepare for the worst, Scotty,” Stiles sighs, and hits ‘send’ on that email to the IRS. “Prepare for the worst.”

* * *

So Stiles regretfully tells his other pending client requests that they’ll be on delay due to unforeseen supply issues, and for the one he was working on with Derek, he sets up a meeting so he can explain the problem in person. And then he goes down to city hall and stands in line in some hallway for two and a half hours, because setting up needs permits, taking down needs permits, putting on indefinite fucking hold needs permits.

By the time he gets out of that linoleum hellhole, he’s tired, thirsty, hungry, has weirdly sticky hands even though he didn’t touch anything he didn’t bring in with him, and he has a cramp in his left leg. He just wants to go home.

Stiles stops to dump his permit stuff off at his university office, since he also has to refile everything with them but he just doesn’t want to do that right now. The department receptionist calls something at him as he stalks by, but he doesn’t want to deal with whatever fundraiser or stupid alumni networking thing or _office hours_ (when he doesn’t teach! he very specifically said no teaching in his contract!) bullshit the dean wants. So nope, he doesn’t listen.

And yep, that’s Derek standing in the hall. He’s in the middle of paging through…that looks like the initial analysis report. How does he have the report.

Derek’s head snaps up and his eyes widen, even though Stiles has been in smell- and hearing distance for the last two minutes. Then he pulls his shoulders back and straightens up and, somehow, while he’s facing Stiles with both hands in full view, manages to look furtive about shuffling the pages back together. “Hey. I didn’t know you were—”

“Were you going through my mail?” Stiles says.

There are envelopes and flyers and magazines neatly stacked at Derek’s feet, next to his bookbag, all of them with Stiles’ name on them. 

“I…saw the lab name on the envelope,” Derek says. Now he’s pulling off the feat of scowling while looking like the werewolf who got caught with the chicken in his mouth.

Stiles gets his mail at this office through a slot in his door, and he hasn’t checked it in a couple days because he’s been too busy flipping out. He also doesn’t have nearly as many wards on this office as he does on pretty much anywhere else he regularly keeps stuff, because the university made a big deal of that one time that student brought his non-student boyfriend and a little bit of pyrotechnics happened. And he hasn’t really been checking those either, because goddamn Derek Hale.

“Shit,” Derek mutters, and then fidgets awkwardly with the report. “I. Look. Stiles, I—”

Also, the fucking university lab would keep sending the reports here, in hard copy, instead of electronically to his email, because their fucking backend is about as well-thought-out as their security policies. If they didn’t give him such a steep discount…well, Stiles is kind of rethinking that one as he goes up to his office door. Which is locked, but now that he’s looking for them, it does have those tell-tale scratches around the keyhole from picky little claws.

“Stiles. Listen, I’m sorry, I just—” Derek says, his voice rising.

And when Stiles opens the door and slaps his hand on the rune to activate recent usage patterns, he sees…a lot more than just somebody picking his mail off the floor. Somebody’s also been paging through the textbooks he keeps around entirely for intimidation purposes, because when he looks stuff up he uses those nifty inventions called smartphones and computers and digital databases. Paging through them a lot. Actually, it looks like somebody’s been using the place as a private study hole.

Stiles…blinks, then takes a deep breath and turns around. “Okay, so I don’t—anyway, Derek, I needed to talk to you because I don’t think this is working out.”

“What?” Derek says. He looks like he doesn’t understand—like he _literally_ doesn’t understand what Stiles just said. His mouth moves like he’s repeating the words to himself, and then he gets it and steps back, mouth still half-open, and now he looks like he’s been stabbed in the gut. “Wait, what? I mean—I’m sorry, I know it was a stupid move, but—”

“It’s not about whatever you were doing in my office.” Stiles says. “I mean, I don’t know—I don’t even want to speculate, okay, but it’s not that, it’s that—fuck!”

Because yeah, so Derek had been grabbing up all his shit and scrambling up behind Stiles while he’d been talking, and Stiles had been looking at swirly yellow hotspots, and then Derek had scooted away from the shock. But his stuff stayed put, and obviously now is the time for Stiles to fall over it, because it’s gotta be more awkward than it already is.

Stiles flails and manages to at least hook himself onto the door knob, although of course the door swings in, so it drags him backwards just as he’s trying to right himself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, look, I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s really, really not you, well, I mean, in the sense that you’re not responsible because honestly it kind of is you, in the sense that—”

So Derek’s bag. Is open. Well, actually, it’s basically vomiting out its contents at Stiles’ feet. And it has this notebook that’s been turned inside-out, and its pages are all crinkled and bent with use, and also, are covered with various formulae and magic circles that Stiles regularly uses. Next to those are neatly bulleted notes like _look this up_ and _see page 52 of blah blah book_ and _ask him this_ and _don’t ask him this_.

There’s also a bunch of take-out menus from places that Stiles likes, with little sticky flags covered in more notes like _smelled on him_ and _smelled in office_. There’s Scott’s clinic schedule. There’s a booklet of flannel swatches. There’s a frequent customer card from Stiles’ favorite coffeeshop with dated stamps, which are all post-meeting him. There is a fucking printout of a knotting dildos website, with circled ones that Stiles definitely owns, and definitely took with him to the trial at the hospital.

So. Well. Never let it be said that Stiles can’t put one and one together when it is bitchslapping his reality.

Stiles looks up at Derek, who is mid-wince, looking so miserable he isn’t even scowling. “Derek, are we stealth-dating?”

“I’m sorry,” Derek says. He’s raking his hand over and over through his hair. His shoulders are so hunched up that it is doing the impossible, and making that leather coat look like it’s wearing him instead of the other way around. “I know—I know you just want a business partner. I wasn’t actually going to do anything.”

“I…so I said that because I thought you were worried you were getting tricked into sex, and you’re—I’m not doing that. I’m really not,” Stiles says. He’s basically on verbal autopilot right now because his mind is blue-screen-of-death every time he tries to compute the odds of this. Just. What.

Derek takes a second out of his misery to look confused. “Why would I—okay, I had the wrong idea at first but—”

“You had two epically abusive girlfriends, fallout from girlfriend one led to systematic bullying but instead of expelling the shit out of those assholes, the school blamed you and juvy court almost bought it, your second girlfriend got you stuck in a murder investigation, _again_ , till she roofied you so they stopped thinking you were a suspect, university screwed you over for their clear failure to fucking psych-screen their employees, and on top of that your student loan lender illegally doubled your interest rate.” Stiles lets go of the knob and sits his ass on the floor so he can wave both hands. Because sometimes, the dramatic gesture is, in fact, underplaying it. “Also, you kind of gave me the impression you don’t like me on a personal level?”

“What, no, I like—wait, you…know about Jennifer too?” Derek says. Then he frowns. “But some of that—my juvenile record and my—my _loans_?”

“Ah. Yeah. So I um, illegally pulled your records.” Stiles pauses, because he’s got a whole bunch of excuses all lined up and ready and he just…can’t. Fuck it, if he’s going to bomb, he’s going to do it honestly. “All of them. Pretty much. And I just, Derek, I really, really like you, and—”

“Wait. Wait, wait, wait.” Derek’s staring at Stiles and it doesn’t involve misery or anger. “You know about all of that. And you still like me.”

“Derek, I want to fuck the shit out of you and then knot you stupid and remotely set fire to everybody who’s ever fucked with you,” Stiles sighs. “That’s why this isn’t working.”

“Well, why can’t you do that?” Derek says.

Stiles opens his mouth. Stops and looks at the guy, and Derek appears to be serious. He also appears to be…he’s grinning, and it’s not his amused face. He’s grinning and he’s _happy_.

“Um. I violated your privacy in about a zillion different ways,” Stiles says. “Also, if we’re working together—”

“We can’t have sex?” Derek says. He’s still grinning. In fact, he’s starting to look a little fevered around the eyes, and it really shouldn’t make Stiles want to get up and lick him from belly to throat, but it does.

“I think some people would have moral issues with mixing sex and business.” Stiles does get onto his feet. Because the carpeting is tissue paper over concrete, and his ass hurts.

Derek’s brows lift, while the rest of Derek takes a nice big step over that gutted bag of his and really, really close to Stiles. “Well, so far as you go, I don’t. You?”

“I…am admittedly flexible about this, normally. But the privacy—” Stiles says.

“Saves me the trouble of explaining. I hate talking about that,” Derek says, with a shrug that’s a little tighter than his breezy tone.

Stiles is maybe starting to grin, too. “And not liking me—”

“I like you,” Derek says. Like Stiles is an idiot, but also, like he’s trying to lick Stiles’ mouth with just his voice.

“Okay, so I say remotely set fire to people, I do actually mean that,” Stiles says. And kicks some annotated take-out menus out of the way so Derek can keep edging closer. “Literally. In the literal, non-emphasis meaning of the word.”

“Good,” Derek says. Just a touch of homicide to his smirk, but it does work for him. Like, _damn_ , does it work for him.

And then they’re about as close as they’re gonna get without touching. Which Stiles is going to rectify, but he has his hands halfway to Derek’s arms when Derek suddenly grimaces. He glances down, then back up at Stiles, and his shoulders are flinching back again.

“Hey. Look. So the, well, what I did—” he starts.

“Oh, my God, you weirdo stalker, whatever, doing research is _hot_ ,” Stiles says, and just yanks the guy over.

He’s got his leg hooked up around the back of Derek’s knee and both hands fisted in Derek’s hair before they even hit his desk. Derek grabs at Stiles’ ass and for a wonderful second he’s jamming their bodies together, shoulders to groin, and then he stumbles and has to throw back one hand to catch himself against the desk. Which also tilts him down and Stiles keeps that going, working him like a seesaw till Derek’s sprawled out over the top of the desk.

Kissing Derek is really great. Really. Sucking his neck, that’s just fucking magic. Derek gasps and then makes this low, achy kind of moan, and these shivers go through him so hard that those alone rub Stiles up to half-mast. Stiles plants himself squarely astride one thick, tightly-muscled thigh, and grinds down on it and then sinks his teeth deep into that straining tendon running up Derek’s throat, and Derek grabs whatever the hell is under them and claws it into confetti. 

Stiles tries to remember if any of it was important. Then says fuck it, and humps himself a couple inches higher so that he can get his fly open. Derek rocks under him, kicking at the desk for some reason—he’s trying to get his feet up so he can spread his bent knees and even fully-clothed, that is a _great_ view. He whines, because Stiles stopped biting him to take it in, and then swipes weakly at Stiles’ jeans.

“You rip my clothes and I am—” is all Stiles has to say, swatting Derek’s hands away.

Derek whines again, kind of pissier about it, and then switches to trying to get his own jeans open and down. His shirt flaps up and Stiles strokes his free hand over the swathe of exposed belly, riding it as Derek arches up, making that crooning noise again. Those abs feel as good as they look, all taut little twitches, and when he catches a nipple with a fingernail, Derek tips his chin up and the gorge of his throat bobs in a shaky swallow and he looks so good Stiles stops with his jeans only down to his knees and dives back in for a long kiss. Fucks his tongue as deep into Derek’s mouth as it’ll go.

Groaning, Derek sucks at it, then breaks away as he finally manhandles his jeans past the curve of his ass. He kicks them off in short order, his head twisting over to the side so Stiles drops to lick and suck at the hollow just under his jaw. Lets the tremble of Derek’s whimper dance on his tongue.

“Stiles,” Derek rasps. “Stiles. The—”

So Stiles reluctantly yanks his hand off Derek’s really, very grabbable, very pillowy buttocks, all soft yield and instant bounce back, and hits a rune and the door shuts.

“What, no, not that,” Derek hisses, trying to tilt his hips up against Stiles’ thigh. “I had lube in my—”

“Oh, _that_ ,” Stiles says, and gets so he’s lying belly-to-belly with the guy. He twists his foot around, catches the drawer handle, and then sucks his way down the front of Derek’s throat, across the collarbone, halfway over a pectoral, and finally gets his hand into the drawer and on a packet. Then he slaps around till the packet catches on one of Derek’s claws, nuzzling at the spit-trails he’s left all over Derek’s shirt.

Derek rips open the packet, Stiles lubes up his fingers, and then slinks back up for another lung-busting kiss while his hand does his work between Derek’s legs. He’s kind of wondering, what with that show with the dildo—oh. Nope. Nice and tight there, good.

“Get in already,” Derek snaps at him. Because Stiles stopped making out to get that third finger in.

Stiles stabs all three fingers in to the knuckles, then laughs as Derek shudders and flops bonelessly back. 

“Okay, in,” he says. He laughs again at Derek’s half-hearted growl, working up Derek’s shirt with his free hand till it’s bunched up as high as it’ll go, and then pushes his thumb over a nipple. Then into it. Holds it there, rocking back and forth, while he nips and laps all along Derek’s collarbone, backing off whenever the other man crooks his neck, trying to get Stiles to go higher. “So your stalking, tell me you _also_ went to my neighborhood sex shop, or watched me watch porn in the library or something, so you know—”

Derek pants, hips jerking down onto Stiles’ fingers, head lolling in clumps and clumps of sweat-sticky snarls of paper strings. He catches Stiles’ eye, then shudders. Rolls his head back and his throat up. “Stiles, _please_.”

“Fuck. _Fuck_ , you’re so perfect—” Stiles yanks his fingers out and hefts up Derek’s legs, and shoves his cock in and just. It is so fucking good. He’s been in a lot of people, both sexes, and he’s had some amazing sex but this. Fuck, he just wants to _live_ here.

Derek whimpers, hitches up his chin. Stiles tries a nice, slow thrust and Derek’s ass clutches him in way deeper than he was planning on, but whatever, it is good and he is just gonna go with it. 

“Just, fuck, you what, taught yourself fertility synching just—just so you could—” Stiles gasps. He sets up as fast a rhythm as he can stand and be sure it won’t send them flying over the other edge of the desk, and then Derek reaches around and grabs his thigh and bears into his cock at the same time and fuck it, he’ll risk the concussion. “—fucking taught yourself with _my books_ , fuck—did you text me those questions from my office, holy shit, Derek, were you—”

“—not—not all of them—” Derek barely manages, hissing through his teeth. He keeps hitching up his chin. 

Oh, _werewolf_. Stiles twists his head down and he can’t bite down, he’s fucking Derek too hard for that, but he lets his teeth rake along Derek’s throat on the downstroke and Derek seizes up and comes and his ass squeezes Stiles into following. 

It. Is. So. _Good_.

And then Derek twitches. It’s a shaky little twitch, sore just in how it twists at the end, and it’s good, but then Derek does it again. And again.

“What the hell, can you just—” Stiles snaps, still gasping. 

He pushes himself off Derek’s chest and Derek looks at him with big, incredibly dazed eyes, spit-smeared mouth, up-crooked throat. “Knot?” he says, small and breathless.

Stiles opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again because he’s fucking moaning with glee, Jesus. And yeah, obviously, knotting. Thank God he’s a good enough mage to just will it at this point, doesn’t have to waste time on chants or gestures.

“Oh, fuck.” Derek wrenches almost too tight around him, rocks a little. Breathes in sharply, out, then in again, and then relaxes so, so slowly into it, all trembling muscle. His head goes down and he shudders again, then lets out a very long, very satisfied sigh. “Fuck. Good.”

There is…not really much Stiles can add to that. He shifts slightly across Derek to get more comfortable, wipes off some sweat that’s getting into his eyes. Drops his hand back over Derek’s one shoulder, tucks his head against the other.

“So,” Derek says maybe ten minutes later, not having moved an inch in the meantime. “It’s okay, right? We’re not quitting.”

“Uh, yeah. Except—oh, shit, I just—now I gotta get all the permits redone, and email people, and—” Stiles trails off into some swearing, patting around till he remembers which pocket had his phone. 

Also, huh, he doesn’t even have his jeans all the way off. He starts wiggling his legs to make them slide down, which makes Derek squirm, which is…nice, but he’s trying to write proper English sentences. He gives up on his jeans and just starts texting and emailing. It’s only a couple hours later, hopefully the permit people have treated his paperwork with their usual slow-ass negligence and he can just recall it instead of having to reapply.

Derek shifts up, then shifts back. Something small and dark moves across Stiles’ field of vision and he looks up, and Derek’s got his phone out, too. “Do you want me to email the client?” Derek says. “Say we got the results?”

“Um…wait, I should forward you…” Stiles digs up that email scheduling the meeting with the client and sends it to Derek “…okay, use that thread.”

Which Derek does, and then he moves his phone aside to look a little warily at Stiles. “What?”

“Nothing,” Stiles says, smiling at him. “Just, wow, this really _is_ going to work.”

Derek pauses, and then he smiles back, a little tentatively. “So…anything else?”

“Lemme just see,” Stiles says, going back to his phone. “Give me a sec.”

“Okay,” Derek says, and settles under him.

* * *

“So let me get this straight,” Lydia says. “Thanks to my flyer, stalker boys fell in love.”

Derek glowers at her, to which Lydia just smiles smugly and flips her hair over her shoulder, in a textbook-perfect example of how to fuck-you flaunt your throat. Stiles feels the tiny move Derek makes towards her and shoves his hand a little deeper into Derek’s back jeans pocket to kill it.

“No, Lyds, you cannot use it as a testimonial,” Stiles sighs.

Lydia rolls her eyes. “Like I was ever. Pro bono favors to old friends aside, I don’t usually market to the romantically psycho demographic.”

“You’re really friends with her,” Derek mutters, slouching down till his head’s resting against Stiles’ shoulder.

“Yep. And we do kind of owe her, so no bite-y,” Stiles says. He slips his hand out of Derek’s pocket and works his arm up till he’s got it slung around Derek’s neck, locking the man in place. Which in turn makes Derek snort, because he totally knows what Stiles is doing and is just going with it ‘cause, and then blatantly nuzzle into Stiles’ loose shirt-collar. “Speaking of, Lydia, as my old friend, how would you like to help me out on a couple projects on the flipside? Paid, even.”

Lydia fakes disinterest for all of a hot second, then grins and leans forward over her espresso. “Well, it’s you, it’ll be interesting at least, and I do get a little…bored…just _fixing_ reputations all the time. Who are we burning?”

Stiles grins back at her. “Let’s start here,” he says, over Derek’s very approving purr, and hands her the business card for Derek’s student loan account representative. “Gotta make sure the partnership’s not compromised, you know, and then we can _really_ have some fun.”

**Author's Note:**

> Photography – the show makes the problem with head-on photos of werewolves look like something similar to lens flare, in which case there are multiple solutions photographers can use to eliminate it. Not sure why the in-show police never try it.
> 
> Timeline-wise, Stiles graduated high school a year early and his dad talked him into starting college classes in the summer, with the idea that it’d finally keep Stiles too busy to get into trouble. So Stiles effectively ripped through undergrad in two years and then stuck around to do his post-graduate work at the same university ‘cause his friends were still there. Derek ends up still being in school when Stiles already has two degrees, even though he’s older, because Derek got held back in high school and then took more time off during his undergraduate degree.
> 
> Lydia's sort of a cross between a PR agency and a crisis management firm here.


End file.
